Neither Lady nor Slave

Working Women of the Old South

Susanna Delfino, Michele Gillespie, Susanna Delfino, Michele Gillespie

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780807854105, 9780807827352
• eBook ISBN: 9780807861301
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

Although historians over the past two decades have written extensively on the plantation mistress and the slave woman, they have largely neglected the world of the working woman. Neither Lady nor Slave pushes southern history beyond the plantation to examine the lives and labors of ordinary southern women — white, free black, and Indian.

Contributors to this volume illuminate women’s involvement in the southern market economy in all its diversity. Thirteen essays explore the working lives of a wide range of women — nuns and prostitutes, iron workers and basket weavers, teachers and domestic servants — in urban and rural settings across the antebellum South. By highlighting contrasts between paid and unpaid, officially acknowledged and “invisible” work within the context of cultural attitudes regarding women’s proper place in society, the book sheds new light on the ambiguities that marked relations between race, class, and gender in the modernizing South.

The contributors are E. Susan Barber, Bess Beatty, Emily Bingham, James Taylor Carson, Emily Clark, Stephanie Cole, Susanna Delfino, Michele Gillespie, Sarah Hill, Barbara J. Howe, Timothy J. Lockley, Stephanie McCurry, Diane Batts Morrow, and Penny L. Richards.

Part One
The Rural World and the Coming of the Market Economy

Chapter One

Dollars Never Fail to Melt Their Hearts: Native Women and the Market Revolution

JAMES TAYLOR CARSON

In the spring and summer of 1797, Louis-Phillipe, Duke of Orleans and heir to the French throne, fled the violence of the French Revolution for the hustle and bustle of the New Republic. During his tour of the United States, he and his fellow exiles visited the big cities of the Northeast, the small towns of the West, and, most remarkably of all, the Cherokees of East Tennessee. The duke wrote down much of what he saw, and among the several things that struck him as either odd or novel about Cherokee culture was the allegedly amorous proclivities of the women. He compared their sureness in matters of the flesh to the women of his homeland, but the apparent commonplaceness of prostitution in the Cherokee towns shocked his otherwise open mind. “[A]ll Cherokee women,” Louis-Phillipe reported, “are public women in the full meaning of the phrase: dollars never fail to melt their hearts.”¹

The love of the dollar that the duke noted was linked to the particular sexual and hospitality mores of Cherokee women that predated contact with Europeans as well as to the inroads that new forms of economic production and exchange were making among the towns and households of the native South in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For the most part, native women lived and worked beyond the gaze of the settlers, the officials, and the missionaries who created the historical record ethnohistorians use to study the past. They also left very few documents of their own. But when native women appear in diaries, letters, and papers, it is clear that the market revolution challenged older modes of production and exchange and introduced new demands, new forms of exchange, and new forms of household production.

Scholars who have studied native women and the market revolution generally have characterized the changes that resulted in their lives as deleterious and degrading. The switch from household subsistence production to production for sale in a money economy not only subjugated native women to an alien economic order, some have argued, but also eroded their self-sufficiency, influence, and power within their own societies.² To be sure, the economic changes that accompanied the market revolution of the early nineteenth century impinged upon women’s self-sufficiency and power. Creeping capitalism also introduced to native people the style and substance of the class system that structured southern settler society. Before the federal government removed the southern First Nations in the 1830s, such economic inroads introduced to native people notions of consumerism and class but failed to overturn wholly older forms of inherited and earned status. As long as native women maintained control over their homes and families, the means of production, buying, selling, and trading, they were able to retain the cultural, social, and political rights and responsibilities that had defined them as women long before Europeans had set foot in North America. Finding a balance between material innovation and cultural conservation constituted the central theme of their working lives.

The basic patterns of native women’s working lives had been set several centuries before contact. By 1000 B.C., women in some parts of the South had domesticated a variety of wild plants, which they added to the nuts, berries, roots, and fruits that they gathered to complement the meat procured by the men who hunted.³ The introduction of corn to the South between A.D. 700 and 900 enabled women to assume an even more important role in the economy. They raised the large quantities of food that fueled the formation of the great Mississippian societies that covered the region on the eve of contact. With the development of horticulture, women replaced the old hunting and gathering subsistence economy with a form of production that met the societies’ subsistence needs while also providing a surplus that could be stored for future use.⁴

Stories told by the descendants of the Mississippians and other early peoples placed women, corn, and farming at the center of their lives. According to the Cherokees, corn came from their ancestral mother, Selu, and was passed on to them through the shedding of her blood. Choctaw elders told children the story of a crow that flew up from the south and dropped a small grain at the feet of a little girl. “What is this?” the girl asked. “Corn,” replied the mother. The Creeks believed that corn came to them in the guise of an old woman, and that “if it is not treated well it will become angry.”⁵

It is not altogether clear how men and women in Mississippian societies partitioned economic and political power. Because of their association with warfare and diplomacy, men controlled relations with outsiders and dominated political offices. Vested with the official power to make decisions on behalf of the communities that they represented, men held what scholars have defined as “authority.” Women lacked access to such formal expressions of power, but through the institutions of the clans and the households, women were able to enjoy the “influence” that came with the control of land, property, and children.⁶ There were, nevertheless, important exceptions that suggest women’s exercise of power was more complex than notions of either authority or influence allow. Early reports of Spanish explorers, for example, make clear that women governed some Mississippian chiefdoms. The Lady of Cofitechequi attempted to enlist Hernando de Soto as a military ally in 1540. Some years later, Juan Pardo met the female chief of Guatari in the piedmont of present-day North Carolina. Female leadership may not have been common in the Mississippian South, but it is reasonable to conclude that women could exercise considerable authority as well as influence.⁷

European colonization of the South introduced to Mississippians many things that shaped the way native women lived and worked. First and foremost were lethal Old World diseases like smallpox, measles, and influenza that decimated the region’s population and brought a quick end to the Mississippian societies. In the aftermath of the demographic collapse, remnant groups clustered into new social groupings that shared certain Mississippian cultural features but that held identities wholly distinct from the earlier societies. In the Lower Mississippi River valley, remnants coalesced into groups that French and English traders called the Choctaws, who, in 1700, numbered approximately twenty-one thousand, and the Chickasaws, who had a population of nearly five thousand. In present-day Georgia and Alabama, the same process produced the roughly nine thousand Creeks. Future infusions of other remnant groups augmented the Creek population throughout the eighteenth century. In the Appalachians, new groups infiltrated the fertile valleys, merged with the people who had survived contact, and formed the original sixteen or so thousand Cherokees.⁸

Equally important to the changing world in which native women lived were new flora, like peach trees and cotton plants, and new fauna, like poultry, cattle, and horses, that the Europeans had brought with them. When women adopted new plants and animals, they enhanced their ability to feed their families and their towns and to trade with the newcomers. Without forsaking the cultivation of aboriginal crops like corn, squash, and beans, the manufacture of pottery, and the weaving of cloth spun from plant fibers, women began in the 1730s to raise chickens and hogs, to use brass kettles and glass bottles, to sew clothing from European strouds, and to trade their produce to the skin traders who frequented their towns in order to cover the cost of the goods they purchased. By the late 1700s, women had become thoroughly enmeshed in the frontier exchange economy, a trade in foodstuffs, household items, and personal services that linked native people and colonists in economic relationships beyond the oversight of the imperial governments.⁹

Over time a new interest in profit challenged ancient traditions of hospitality and reciprocity that had previously conditioned women’s behavior toward outsiders who came into their towns and homes. Cherokee women, for example, sought to make the English garrison at Fort Loudon dependent on them for supplies of corn and other fruits and vegetables. One woman in particular, Nancy Butler, worked for the soldiers as a purchasing agent.¹⁰ Choctaw women as well provisioned military men stationed in their midst. “We began our Traffic for Provisions,” one soldier reported, “with the Women, who for Paint and Beads gave us Fowls, Eggs, [and] Indian Corn.”¹¹ Another visitor to the Choctaws remarked that the women carried on a lively trade in pigs and chickens and that they “carried the spirit of husbandry so far as to cultivate leeks, garlic, cabbage and some other garden plants, of which they make no use, in order to make profit of them to the traders.”¹²

The frontier exchange economy created a tension between the traditional ethic of reciprocity by which native women had welcomed visitors with gifts of food and shelter and the novel idea of profit. Market possibilities that grew out of hospitality triggered women’s departure from a subsistence-surplus economy toward a market economy. For the transition from a subsistence-surplus economy to a market economy to occur, economic activity had to be separated from the cultural moorings that tie production to gender roles and other cultural imperatives, and it had to begin to be replaced by alien ideas like price and profit. Southern native women never completed the transformation before their removal in the 1830s. Instead, they created what one historian has called a marketplace economy, an economy where cash, credit, and surplus production coexisted with the particular cultural conventions of the indigenous precontact economy.¹³ By the middle of the eighteenth century, native women had begun to value market-oriented production and exchange, but they still looked to their cultures instead of to their markets for their identities as women, mothers, daughters, and farmers.

What changed was their power as women relative to the power of their sons and husbands in the postcontact South. The ambiguous mixture of authority and influence enjoyed by native women in Mississippian times survived well into the eighteenth century but diminished in the face of the deerskin trade and colonial warfare. Among the Creeks, “Beloved Women,” who belonged to the most prestigious clans, weighed in on discussions of government and diplomacy.¹⁴ The Cherokees, too, had “Beloved Women.”¹⁵ Captain Henry Tim-berlake likened them to “Amazons,” and trader James Adair marveled at what he described as their “petticoat government.”¹⁶ The extent of Cherokee women’s power is, however, a subject of some debate. Anthropologist Raymond Fogelson has characterized their power as one of indirect influence on brothers, sons, and clan members. In contrast, historian Theda Perdue has attributed to Cherokee women a much more direct role in government and diplomacy. From deciding the fate of war captives, to exchanging wampum belts with Seneca women, to adjudicating infractions of certain cultural rules, it is clear, Perdue argues, that Cherokee women exerted an important influence in the home as well as in the council house.¹⁷ Choctaw women, like their Cherokee counterparts, also made decisions regarding war captives, and their oral tradition attributed a great deal of importance to a female chief named Ohoyao Minko.¹⁸ By the latter decades of the 1700s, however, women’s power seems to have diminished, becoming, in the words of one historian, “almost negligible.”¹⁹ The deerskin trade and the colonial system of client warfare had put more and more economic and political authority into the hands of male hunters and warriors, which may have circumvented traditional avenues of female power and transformed it from fact to rumor. “I never heard of, or knew of,” naturalist William Bartram wrote in the 1770s, “any late instances of the female sex bearing rule or presiding either in council or the field, but according to report, the Cherokees & Cricks [sic] can boast of their Semiramis’s [sic], Zenobeas, & Cleopatra’s [sic].”²⁰ Although their power may have decreased over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the early nineteenth century was a world where farming replaced deer hunting and warring as the economic mainstays of the South’s First Nations. Women stood at the forefront of the new economy, and as they adopted new agricultural products and livestock and new ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part One: The Rural World and the Coming of the Market Economy
• Part Two: Wage-Earning Women in the Urban South
• Part Three: Women as Unacknowledged Professionals
• Part Four: Working Women in the Industrial South
• Contributors
• Index